Vera Mantero Lisbon

We are going to miss everything we don't need

Vera Mantero was born in Lisbon in 1966. She studied classical dance until she was eighteen. She worked for five years in the Ballet Gulbenkian, in Lisbon. In New York and Paris she studied contemporary dance technique, voice and theatre, and by then she completely cut with her ballet origins. As a dancer she also worked in France with Catherine Diverrès. She started creating her own choreography in 1987 and since 1991 she has been showing her work in theatres and festivals in Europe, Brazil, USA, Canada and Singapore.

For her, dance is not a given fact; she believes that the less she acquires it, the closer she will be to it; she uses dance and performance work to understand what she needs to understand; she sees less and less sense in a specialized performer (a dancer or an actor or a singer or a musician) and more and more sense in an especially trained total performer; she sees life as a terribly rich and complicated phenomena and work as a continuous fight against the spirits' impoverishment, hers' and the others', a fight which she considers essential at this point of history.

Etymologically, the word "object" contains the idea that an object is something that is placed before us, something that exists or is there to be seen. We are going to miss everything we don't need presents objects of the world. Between these objects and those who manipulate them exists a rebound effect, an unexpected unveiling of meaning(s). Between these objects, those who manipulate them and the spectator exists a triangle - a tension that pushes the boundaries of ideas and sensations, as symbols become vibrating forces. Ideas are paths to other ideas and as on all paths, there are passages that widen, narrow and bifurcate. We can follow these pathways with different rhythms and patterns of breath, as if thoughts were shaped by the way they pulsate and clash. Objects of the world, in contact and short-circuiting, are on a path and exist somewhere between the material and the ethereal, the quotidian and the dreamlike, the generic and the exceptional. And it might be precisely in this rearrangement of our everyday world - this world of generic objects, production, consumption and waste - that we can touch another side of things.